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Nuit Debout: a new chapter in European worker’s struggles

It was not so long ago that the hopes of many socialists were pinned on the struggle in Greece. In the Syriza experiment it was believed that a left reformist government, in control of the state apparatus and with the electoral support of the working class, could face down the European powers and the global financial institutions.
 
The experiment was a disastrous failure, underlined by Greece recently receiving over €11 billion in funds, most of which will go back to the banks as interest payments. In return the Syriza led government will implement another round of austerity on an already impoverished working class and oversee a programme of mass privatisation. 
 
In fact there is an old saying among Marxists that reformists, faced with capitalist crisis, immediately become anti-reformists who lead the charge against the working class.
 
That has happened in Greece and also in France. The Hollande government was supposed to soften the blows of austerity. Instead it led military adventures abroad and cuts at home, imposed emergency laws and whipped up hatred of refugees.
 
It used the Paris attacks to bring in emergency legislation to restrict democratic rights. Then it proposed employment laws that would allow employers to slash wages and install a longer working week. The government added  insult to injury by using another emergency law to bypass parliament.
 
The immediate response was the rise of Nuit debout, a youth movement that came out at night and occupied the Place de la Republic and city centre squares across France. Significant state violence failed to displace them, and they were joined by the organized working class in strikes across energy and transport.

The central political fact is that we are now moving into territory that goes beyond reformism. The reformists tell the workers and youth that further sacrifices are needed. In response they are saying that the workers must come first.
 
The strengths of the new movement is balanced by weaknesses.  The youth are able to organize and mobilize because they are free of the stultifying hands of social  democracy and the trade union bureaucracy. However they lack political experience and the level of class consciousness to be found in the workers movement. Some of the practices of consensus brought forward from the occupy movement are a barrier to political growth.
 
The workers, with much higher levels of discipline and class consciousness, are bound inside the trade union movement. The French bureaucracy have a history of   militant mobilization followed by deal and demobilisation. Where the youth called for the removal of the new law, they had called for consultation.
 
When the deal is struck there will be great pressure to fragment and demobilise the resistance. 
 
The glue that will tie them together is political. Capitalism now says that the gains of generations of workers must be set aside to ensure its survival. The response must be that capitalist property rights, capitalist interests, must be set aside to ensure that the interests of the workers prevail.
 
The organizational form of that resistance should be a revolutionary party of the working class, able to draw on our past history, to organize and strike together, to debate and learn from our actions and to reach beyond the borders of France to mobilize workers across the continent. 

 


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